Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday January 31, 2012 @06:40PM
from the just-in-case-you're-too-lazy-to-walk-over-there dept.

New submitter jpwilliams writes "Gizmag reports that researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have tested a 10-centimeter bullet that can be fired from a smooth-bore rifle to hit a laser-marked target one mile away. The bullet 'includes an optical sensor in the nose to detect a laser beam on a target. The sensor sends information to guidance and control electronics that use an algorithm in an eight-bit central processing unit to command electromagnetic actuators. These actuators steer tiny fins that guide the bullet to the target.' Interestingly, accuracy improves with targets that are further away, because 'the bullet's motions settle the longer it is in flight.'"

No offence, but is there any good reason to use domain name shorteners when posting links in forums / blogs? Surely it's easier and quicker to just copy and paste the original url, which actually has the additional benefit of giving us a clue as to where it leads to? Or maybe you're interested in the click stats Goo.gl provides?

Having said that, I can see from your/. comments history that you're not an idiot so I did follow the link, which for anyone else interested, resolves to http://www.instructables.com/id/Laser-Ball/ [instructables.com].

The bullet has 1/3 the muzzle velocity of a regular 50cal, can't be used in current rifles as a smooth barrel is needed, and costs 200x's as much as a regular bullet. Due to these issues it will never be integrated into regular forces, the only real use is for assassination because one shot is all a sniper gets in those situations before they have to evacuate. If you have 8in accuracy from 1.5miles away no matter the wind you have an effective weapon for a very specialized use outside of that there are no

No, laser guided implies that there are lasers on the bullet that are helping to measure its location wrt it's surroundings. Instead, the laser just paints a target; it guides itself to the target. Hence, self guided.

"I'm not claiming this is a target-guided bullet, I'm saying it's laser-guided bullet."
So, you're claiming that the laser spot isn't the target for the bullet? Now you're being silly, or trolling.

Of course the laser spot isn't the target for the bullet, who's trying to destroy a laser dot?! If you want to shoot someone standing in front of a wall and target them with a laser but they move out of the way before the bullet gets there the laser dot is going to be on the wall behind them, and you'll still hit the laser dot - because it is guiding the bullet - but did you hit the target? No, because the laser dot isn't the target, it's the guide!

This really isn't that difficult a concept to grasp, I can't see why you're having so much trouble with it so let me try this a different way:If you are hiking with a guide what is that guide doing? He/she is 'guiding' you, and doing so not by moving you or positioning you, but by indicating where you need to go. Likewise the laser is indicating to the bullet where it needs to go, by definition it is guiding the bullet, if the laser weren't there the bullet would not know where to go because it has no guide, the bullet will go wherever the laser is pointing because the laser is the bullet's guide, if it were self-guided it wouldn't need a laser. Really it's not that hard.

If you still don't get it then explain to me what you think the purpose of the laser is.

But it costs money (no idea how much) to train that sniper, and if they are injured you've lost their value. Whereas if the guy using this gun is injured the person next to them can pick it up and use it. Not an expert of course...

The training of a sniper is not just in shooting. The USMC Scout Sniper school has three areas of training. Marksmanship is the one that people most immediately associate with a sniper. Observation is the second area of training. Stalking is the third area. This laser guided bullet won't replace a sniper since all it does is replace the marksmanship factor of a sniper. That of course assumes that the system is no heavier than the equipment a scout-sniper team would already take with them and doesn't significantly increase their profile. Scout-snipers will still operate in 2 man teams behind enemy lines and such operatives are still going to have to be highly trained to accomplish the task and if anything, such a system would not want to be used by scout-snipers precisely because we wouldn't want that system to fall into enemy hands.

I don't believe this system is useful from a battlefield perspective. This seems more like a system the CIA would be interested in for usage in an urban environment.

I guess it has to be pretty steady for the time it takes to fire this bullet (and for it to reach target), and "shot" from relatively remote location, which seem to require sniper-type skill on behalf of the "painter", but not shooter.

It requires the high tech 'sniper' skill of "setting up a tripod, pointing the laser at the target, and then taking your hands off". Seriously, a sniper's skill lies not in putting the crosshairs on the target, but in putting the crosshairs off the target... such that wind, bullet drop due to gravity, etc.. etc.. ends up putting the bullet where the amateur would put the crosshairs - and miss. But wind, gravity, etc... don't effect the laser, so an amateur can place the crosshair by eye.

Presumeably, if / when they get this perfected, the squad Sargent ( or whomever ) paints the bad guy with a computer controlled laser (the Navy version, of course, uses a shark) and the rest of the grunts pull the trigger on their AR-18 turbo rifles. The computer ( or shark )keeps track of the victim running away or getting into their tank. Then splat. $10,000 dollars down the drain. But we've used lasers. So it's cool.

Kind of, but you are missing an important point, since the point of this is to improve long range accuracy, well beyond the range of standard infantry weapons (SA80 400m, LSW 1000m) the squad who has this technology has a significant advantage against one that doesn't.

There is also another possibility. The laser needs direct line of sight, but the bullet following a ballistic path only needs to find a laser dot far enough out to have time to correct it's course. Stick a recon guy with a laser designator on the ridge of a hill, keep the rest of the squad on the far side of the hill and fire above the ridge line in the general direction of the enemy. Accurate indirect fire using infantry weapons from a position that the enemy could never hit (beyond a 1 in a billion lucky shot).

Putting the crosshairs off the target is called "kentuckying" or "kentucky windage"; it's for amateur hour. Snipers use scopes that let you dial in the range and windage so that the cross hairs keep the point of aim and point of impact the same. Some scopes for short range sniping use "mil-dots," which is an indexed system of little aimpoints up the vertical axis and along the horizontal axis. Those are typically used in telescopic sights of low magnification. (My hobby used to be long-distance target shooting; now I have a wife and kids; my hobby is dodging responsibility.)

Sniping is mostly about knowing the relationships between a complex set of circumstances. You could train a monkey to use a scope to paint a target with a laser. You know you're on target because you can see the laser on the target.

Knowing you're on target to sent a dumb bullet into a target a mile away is many orders of magnitude more difficult.

5 miles? That's pushing the limits of physics just a little too much. It would take a shitload of luck to get a hit from that far away. Farthest I've personally seen done is just over a mile (1800m).

And as others have pointed out, it takes time and money to train a sniper. It also takes a *lot* of luck at the upper ends of distance. You have to account for ballistic trajectory, air resistance (which changes with the temperature), wind (which can change directions remarkably easily), moving targets, etc.. Even at the speeds a bullet travels at, it still takes a discernable amount of time to reach the target at that distance. Having something you can fire and forget, and let your spotter guide it to its target with a laser pointer is a huge improvement, IMO. And besides, it's not going to cost a million bucks a pop once it's in production. Development may have cost that, but nothing in the device is all that expensive to actually make.

That's a 5" Mk.45 gun, not a rifle, and it's not a sniper, it's an artillery shot.;) That thing has a range well over 5 miles... more like 13nm according to wiki.:) The navy has guns with an operational range >20mi if you're willing to allow a bigger gun like a 12" or a 16"...

Of course, if you're going to allow the Navy to use big guns as "sniper" weapons, I'm going to allow the Army to use an excalibur round... 200+ mile range on that particular type of artillery.:P

And, one thing that you did get wrong. That gun is indeed a "rifle". A non-rifled gun, or a smoothbore, might be good in some place, for some purposes. But, for the most part, that rifling is essential to a destroyer's mission. Of course, with "smart" ammunition, the rifling would probably be redundant.

They said 10cm long (they actually said 4 inches long). A rough guess based off the video, I would say its a 1cm (.40 caliber) flachette, with a 20mm sabot. The smoothbore Rheinmatall on the M1A1 may be a 120mm gun, but it fires a 24mm APFSDS round, or Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot.

So don't be all day about it - aim and fire and let the bullet do the rest of the work, that's what it's for.

The 'other side' already has someone with night-vision goggles scanning for muzzle flashes of sniper weapons. He will easily see the IR laser too. In fact, that laser will give him a short warning that a sniper is about to fire. At 1.5 kilometers range, a second's warning is enough to yell "down" so nobody's torso is in the same place that it was when the trigger was pulled.

If you're covered in flat mirrors, you only get specular reflection, where the light travels in one singular path. If the seeker head is not directly in that path, it will not be able to see you, and will not track. Laser guidance required diffuse reflection, where the laser light is scattered in all directions, and the seeker head can see it from any location.

That's the theory, but practice is frequently something else entirely. Is there any haze, dust, smoke, humidity -- basically any particulates -- in the air? That will scatter the laser light.

A guy I knew recently was showing off with a high-powered laser he picked up somewhere. It was pretty awesome -- he was lighting up mountaintops roughly a mile away. However, I was very surprised to see that there was a very clear, very distinct line from his laser to whatever target he was pointing it at. There

If the laser doesn't light until the trigger is pulled, whT is the point of a laser scope? I would do microsecond laser bursts. Good enough for the bullet optics and if you have the right goggles, but invisible to casual observations.

Application? How about an overhead drone carrying a payload thats roughly the same weight as now, except instead of blowing things up it just shoots you in the face. You dont have to carry a huge amount of munitions when 95% of the bullets will hit the target.

From now on, whenever you see a new military technology you should think about how it works with drones. For example, it probably isnt a coincidence that our new magnetic launch systems on carriers will allow lighter, more fragile aircraft (read, composite drones) to be launched. The official line is it does less damage to tradition aircraft, which it does. But the guys calling the shots on this stuff make war for a living, and the writing is on the wall as far as the future goes. "Lighter. Cheaper. Disposable"

Maybe no good in the traditional sniper role but if this weapon ever gets to the point where it has an effective range that's much greater than any small arms fire then it will have a new role all of its own. That role will be called "shoot the Taliban and laugh at the counter fire".

A mile away is 5280 feet or 1760 yards. Even during WW2, German snipers were killing American soldiers from 1000 yards, and the world record sniper shot during war time is currently two human targets at 2707 yards.

Thinking of Quigley Down Under, myself. See guy running away. Prop rifle on a rock. Fiddle with site. Look through it at guy still running away. Pull trigger. Guy still running.. still running.. then falls down.

Wow, I didn't scroll down enough to notice that. Then again everything bullet related I've ever seen gives the size as caliber but this is the first time I've ever heard a bullet rated by length. (Hmm, rated by length. There's a dick joke that practically writes itself right there.)

Except in common usage, "rifle" has come to mean any type of long gun, whether or not the barrel has rifling. In any case, what other, easy to use term would you use for a modern long gun. Musket wouldn't apply, and those are the only other shoulder arms that use smooth bores. You are just being overly pedantic.

.50cal snipers have some serious kick and that's about a 4 inch bullet.
This is at the high end of what a personal weapon can fire. Increase its size by 2.5x and you no longer have a rifle you have an anti aircraft bullet.
At the rate obesity is going the next generation might just be able to handle the recoil from a 10in anti aircraft shell........

(I think it was the word Assassination that got the slashdot editors to remove it from the "recent" listings. It was on the "recent" listings one second at "yellow" and then *poof* gone! Do they think various government agaencies don't approve of such topics?). Anyway, here's what I wrote:

"From TFA: "This self-guided bullet can chase you down from over a mile away"

A long LONG time ago, I remember reading something that claimed that in every succe

The perfect way to do war, would be to just assassinate each others leaders over and over again until at some point one side get's one, that thinks getting assassinated is not really worth whatever they started that war over. Then that side loses and the war is done.Casualties should be about 5-10 politicians.

I've been watching season 4 of Chuck and just saw this episode. We have nothing to worry about, the CIA will have no problem recovering the bullets. Also the female CIA agent will develop a severe clothing allergy half-way through.

If you look at the final video in the article, this thing isn't even really a bullet. All it is is a scaled-down KE sabot round of the type fired by tanks as an anti-tank round. This is especially true when you consider it is fired from a smooth-bore, as pretty much all modern tanks use smooth-bore cannon as well. It's almost as if they took the 2 main weapons of the modern Western MBT (sabot round and a Hellfire missile), combined them, and shrunk it down for use against personnel. I think it would be interesting to see what type of rifles they would use to fire this round. Would the design and specifications of this round require the development of a new weapon system, or can existing sniper rifles be modified by changing out the barrels from rifled to smooth-bore?

Many people have commented that 10cm is up there in artillery-shell caliber. This new bullet is 10cm long. The pictures show something that's in a typical small-arms caliber, probably 9mm or smaller. It will require a special gun that can chamber an unusually long cartridge, but not an artillery piece.

The real win with this thing will be hitting moving targets. No more estimating range and leading the target. Just keep pointed at it. Sighting and designator system that can lock onto a target already exist, and shrinking them down to rifle-scope size isn't all that hard. There's more video processing going on in any modern video camera or phone.

Who said anything about people? That troublesome bear invading your neighborhood is also a likely target, especially if the animal control officer knows he won't have ANY collateral damage because every bullet hits every time.